School Groups

On my second and third days at Grey Towers I shadowed a few staff members doing programs with groups of second graders. I first watched a seasonal interpreter named Cora give one class a tour of the first floor of the mansion. As soon as the kids got off of the bus I could tell that they were more hyper than most kids that I had dealt with at Daniel Boone. I soon saw, however, that Cora ran quite a tight ship when she gave tours to school groups, and that besides being a little loud, the students were failry well behaved. Each class got a tour of the mansion, as well as a hike on our forestry trail.

At Daniel Boone it was easy to keep kids occupied. Start baking, spinning, or making candles, and you had their attention for the morning. Grey Towers is decidedly less kid friendly. There isn’t anything to touch. You can’t show them how the Pinchots made things like food or clothes because the Pinchots were rich enough to have other people do those things for them, and their kitchen has not been preserved anyway. The Pinchot mansion is full of antiques that we tell everyone up front they cannot touch. A house tour with school kids consists of us telling them about what would have went on in each room of the house, and then walking them through it in an orderly line.

The kids seemed to be quite amazed by the fingerbowl. They couldn’t believe that the Pinchots only used it to pass food. “They never swam in it?” the kids asked, as if they couldn’t see the use of having a pool that no one ever swam in.

We also took the kids on the forestry trail, which is a half mile long path through the woods that is designed to teach people a little about foresty. (I say this with hesitance, if you walked the trail without a guide you’d probably just think it was a normal trail). Lee, who guided the kids through this trail, was very good at teaching them about forestry, and about basic wildlife behavior. He started out by talking to the kids about how they got their food, and how animals get theirs. As we went along the path he pointed out things animals ate. Further along the trail he showed us how to take a core sample from a tree to count the rings and determine its age, and he let all of the kids turn the tool he used to bore into the tree. He also talked to the kids about the Yale Forestry Summer School which Pinchot hosted at Grey Towers for a few years.